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Home/ Digital Civilization/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Brandon McCloskey

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Brandon McCloskey

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You Will Not Believe This Is Just a Powerpoint - 5 views

  • The most awesome 450 page presentation ever." That's how the authors call this slide show—and I agree. It is awesome. But knowing that it was made using only Google Docs and no extra software whatsoever, makes it truly unbelievable.
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    Just goes to show that a lot can be done with free software
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How I'd Hack Your Weak Passwords - 1 views

  • If you invited me to try and crack your password, you know the one that you use over and over for like every web page you visit, how many guesses would it take before I got it?
  • One of the simplest ways to gain access to your information is through the use of a Brute Force Attack. This is accomplished when a hacker uses a specially written piece of software to attempt to log into a site using your credentials.
  • And how fast could this be done? Well, that depends on three main things, the length and complexity of your password, the speed of the hacker's computer, and the speed of the hacker's Internet connection.
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    Now, I could go on for hours and hours more about all sorts of ways to compromise your security and generally make your life miserable - but 95% of those methods begin with compromising your weak password. So, why not just protect yourself from the start and sleep better at night?
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Untitled - Breadcrumb - 0 views

  • Google Breadcrumb allows you to create an easy-to-use mobile learning application without any programming experience; your application works with only three additions to plain text. Easy to create and readable on Internet-enabled smart-phones or computers, Google Breadcrumb gives you maximum output for the development time.
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BBC NEWS | Technology | Learning to love Web 2.0 - 0 views

  • Impressive services
  • Only last week Google splashed out on Writely, a web-based word processor that requires no downloads or installation and just runs in a browser window.
  • They are just the tip of an iceberg
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  • Maybe Web 2.0 is a transitional phase, and once we get used to interacting with online tools in a more natural way and dispense with static web, we will move to a world of true distributed computing.
  • We'll need to make sure that the successful Web 2.0 companies don't just sit on progress because it doesn't serve their business plans, like so many other computing companies have done in the past and continue to do today. If Web 2.0 is the first stage in a revolution, we need to make sure it's a permanent revolution.
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Web 2.0 for all? - 0 views

  • a lot of work around standards for Web 2.0 work has yet to properly started, let alone finished.
  • Some of this work has happened. Things like RSS feeds, XML etc have made it simpler for computers to share complicated bits of data. But it hasn't gone far enough and it's not just data.
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Agricultural Revolution in England 1500 - 1850 - 0 views

  • This new system of farming was remarkable because it was sustainable; the output of food was increased dramatically, without endangering the long-term viability of English agriculture. But just as a sustainable agriculture had been achieved, the development of chemical fertilisers and other external inputs undermined this sustainability. An essentially organic agriculture was gradually replaced by a farming system that depended on energy-intensive inputs dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuels.
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    Article on the advances during the agricultural revolution
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Chinese Cow Manure Generates Electricity In Largest-Ever Methane Capture System | Popul... - 0 views

  • A gigantic Chinese dairy farm is now the world’s largest methane farm, turning a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions into a lucrative renewable energy source.
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    How agricultural advancements are evolving their own energy converters.
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Top judge says internet 'could kill jury system' - 0 views

  • The jury system may not survive if it is undermined by social networking sites
  • "We cannot stop people tweeting, but if jurors look at such material, the risks to the fairness of the trial will be very serious, and ultimately the openness of the trial process on which we all rely, would be damaged."
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    Interesting effects of social media
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Airplane Geeks Podcast - Aviation Podcast - 0 views

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    Great podcast on airplanes
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The History of the Airplane - Orville and Wilbur Wright. - 0 views

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    Researching airplanes and their impact
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What do we mean by currency wars? - 0 views

  • The strength of currencies has become a source of tension between some of the world's biggest economies, especially the US and China. Brazil's finance minister went as far as to warn that his country would not stand idly by as international currency wars threatened its competitiveness. What was he talking about? Watch this animated guide to find out about why countries are falling out with each other because of their currencies.
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    A quick description of what currency wars are
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BBC News - Why companies watch your every Facebook, YouTube, Twitter move - 0 views

  • These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.
  • It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?
  • At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.
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  • One European clothing company, popular with inner city youth in the United States, admits privately that its social media team is baffled by its customers' ever changing slang, and even the online Urban Dictionary provides little help.
  • Social media is quickly becoming a customer relationship management system, as companies have "for the first time access to people's minds in real-time," says Jorn Lyseggen. The tools on offer provide companies with dashboards that show trends, hot topics, the reach of brands, customer mood and how competitors are doing.
  • Social media may be all the buzz, but in reality "only a few firms get it [and use it], it's of peripheral interest for most", says Tom Austin at technology consultancy Gartner. Few realise that using social media has become much more than customer service and reputation management.
  • many social media tools are poorly integrated into the corporate workflow
  • But there are dangers. Financial Times columnist Lucy Kellaway warns that the obsession with social networking can make management lose focus.
  • To survive the world of social media, companies have to throw away their old marketing playbook.
  • "don't push... and don't pretend you are hip"
  • "Once companies have worked out that they should do something with social media, they usually don't know how to do it,"
  • "If you want to influence the people who influence your customers, that's a very powerful game, but it's also very dangerous if you get it wrong."
  • it's not about how many friends or followers somebody has, but whether they make an impact.
  • When Virgin America recently launched new routes from California to Toronto, it used Klout to identify a small group of social media "influencers" and gave them free flights. This generated thousands of tweets, triggered press coverage and delivered more immediate impact than traditional advertising.
  • "Consumers are spending their attention on social media," he says, but firms don't know how to repay them properly. "There's no manual for that yet."
  • Social media are dynamic, and today's Twitter may be tomorrow's forgotten website. "Don't assume that what works today will work tomorrow," says Tom Austin at Gartner. "Your model has to be continually adapted."
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Crowdsourcing: Turning customers into creative directors - 1 views

  • "What we think is good for the consumer doesn't matter - it's what the consumer thinks is good that matters."
  • When you link the consumer to the manufacturer there are huge areas of opportunity
  • It's the internet, of course, that makes crowdsourcing possible - on a global scale.
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  • But there are pitfalls. "The biggest caveat is the issue of curation. It's great you opening the gates up to everybody - but all of a sudden you're going to get a lot more stuff."
  • "We later learned that it was this revolutionary business model. I think the reason it's so pure like that is the reason it's worked so well as a crowdsourcing company."
  • "I think that the way companies are seeing crowdsourcing is a lot different from the way we see it. They are looking at it as this new business model, as a way to outsource your work to an anonymous crowd of people. We're more about giving people something productive to do with their passions."
  • it's not so much the software that makes the company, it's the community
  • "It's an affordable way to be ahead. You're able to see what your customers are thinking and what they're dreaming of, and you're able to measure that against what you're doing."
  • His concern is that by "mining" the crowd in this way, the wealth that results from the work done remains concentrated in the hands of the people who put out the call - ultimately endangering jobs and the economy. Mr Lanier also believes that crowdsourcing threatens creativity.
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    Examples of successful crowdsourcing
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Real-time computing goes from Wall Street to High Street - 0 views

  • If the company could monitor sales of ice cream - or bottled water or sun tan cream - on hot days like this one and then gauge future demand, he said, it could alter the way the company behaved
  • Real-time - the act of responding to events as they happen - is changing the way that the world behaves.
  • The software has also been blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis. Computer programmes automatically sold stocks as fear spread in the markets, because their algorithms have built-in "sell" orders.
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  • SAP's software is also being deployed on offshore oil rigs and even in hospitals around the world. This allows diabetic patients, for example, to have their blood sugar levels monitored and insulin administered if it gets dangerously high.
  • Future applications that are being discussed include the military, such as real-time monitoring of troop and tank movements. StreamBase is already used by the US National Security Agency to monitor security threats. "It's difficult to think of an industry that isn't affected by real-time," Mr Palmer says.
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    How real-time computing is affecting economics
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Can your social networking profile get you a pay rise? - 0 views

  • by watching his Chatter dashboard, Benioff says he can spot - and reward - pivotal individuals who might not have come to his attention in the past
  • If these tools take off, then perhaps 'pivotal individuals' within companies really will get noticed, and businesses will become better meritocracies as a result.
  • Of 3,500 employees in a range of companies and economies, 58% said they would contribute more ideas to their company if they were more likely to be rewarded for them.
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    More about the importance of collaboration
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BBC News - The business of innovation: Steven Johnson - 0 views

  • The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?
  • "[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.
  • "And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.
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  • "I think there's this abiding belief that markets drive innovation, corporations drive innovation, entrepreneurs driven by financial reward drive innovation, and while that's certainly true in many cases there's also this very rich long history of important world-changing ideas coming out of the more or less intellectual commons of the universities.
  • So what should companies be doing to foster innovation in their workforces?
  • "One of the lessons I've learned is that so many of these great innovators, Darwin is a great example of this, one shared characteristic they all seem to have is a lot of hobbies."
  • "Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."
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    How the progress of technology and the economy are affected by creativity. Also the importance of isolation vs collaboration
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Unplugged: Living Without Media - 1 views

  • How could you survive without the media, the internet and a mobile phone for 24 hours?
  • I didn't expect it, but being deprived of the media for 24 hours resulted in my day-to-day activities becoming so much harder to carry out than usual.
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    Following the idea of a media fast
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BBC News - Who'd Be a Web Scientist? - 0 views

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    Could the web be worthy of its own set of scientists to study it?
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Converging on Microsoft: Cloud Storage Divided By National Boundaries | Network World - 0 views

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    Interesting problem with cloud computing. Could it affect trade relationships?
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